Isabel Healthcare Blog

This month is Pulmonary Hypertension Awareness Month when charities launch campaigns to raise awareness about this progressive lung disease which is thought to affect around 1% of the global population (increasing to 10% for those aged over 65). As symptoms are non-specific, the disease is often misdiagnosed, which is why increasing awareness is so critical. While in most cases, no cure is currently available, early diagnosis can massively improve a patient’s outcome.

So, you’ve got a niggling health issue that won’t go away… but the GP can’t see you again for 3 weeks. Onto the internet to see if Dr Google can help. Sound familiar? If it does, you’re not alone.

November is Epilepsy Awareness Month in the US, so in this week’s post we’re going over the basics of this neurological condition that affects more people than you might think. 1 in 26 of us will experience epilepsy at some point in our life, and in the US alone around 150,000 people are diagnosed with epilepsy each year. There are many different types of epilepsy, different types of seizures, and different symptoms for these seizures.

There have been several announcements this week, both in the US and the UK, and also in Australia, on some new drugs that will become available for cystic fibrosis patients. Pharmaceutical company Vertex have reached deals in the UK and Australia for the double-combination drugs Orkambi and Symkevi, while in the US, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has approved a new 3-drug treatment marketed as Trikafta.

Everyone has experienced stomach pain at some point in their life. Often the cause is obvious, such as a stomach bug or too many sit ups at the gym, and the symptoms will disappear in a day or two. Sometimes, however, the cause of a stomach ache isn’t clear, and this can be quite unnerving. There are a few clues when assessing the cause of a stomach ache, and one of these clues is the location. If your stomach ache is in a particular area of the stomach, or abdomen, you can eliminate other causes and narrow down to the cause. One such type of stomach ache dictated by the area of the abdomen is called epigastric pain.

Take a look at the stats for Stomach Cancer, also known as Gastric Cancer, and you’ll realise it’s not an easy one to diagnose. Out of an estimated 28,000 cases in the US each year, nearly a third, 10,960, are expected to die. The figures in the UK are even worse with only 15% of patients expected to live beyond 10 years. The real clue lies in the fact that nearly a third of British patients first present with the illness in their emergency or A&E department, and given that the typical initial symptoms such as indigestion, wind or heartburn aren’t exactly emergency symptoms, this implies that most patients are experiencing a substantial and often fatal delay in getting a diagnosis. As stomach cancer symptoms are often easily mistaken for less serious conditions, it’s understandable that both patient and doctor won’t suspect a potentially fatal cancer as the cause. Which is why we’ve devoted this week’s blog to discussing the symptoms and when to seek advice, in the hopes we can help sufferers present much earlier to their doctor and consequently find a cure.

We all know that our lungs are a vital organ, necessary to keep us alive, and if we don’t have a medical career, we can probably remember some of the information we were taught at high school and that’s about it. Something to do with aioli? Or is that the garlic dip? The good news is that for our bodies to work, we don’t need to know what they’re doing, they are able to function by themselves. But what happens when we get a pain, a rash, or an ache that we’ve never had before, and our body is unable to work as well as it usually does? With something as vital as the lungs, this can be quite alarming, and we suddenly wish we’d paid more attention in biology class. Difficulty breathing and pains in our chest are definitely not symptoms to be ignored, and knowing what the symptoms mean, how to spot them, and what to do next is really important. You should always talk to your doctor if you have any new symptoms that don’t go away, but researching the symptom yourself with a credible symptom checker can really help you and your doctor to reach a diagnosis quicker. Here are the most common causes of problems in your lungs and their symptoms.

Around the globe, September is Suicide Prevention Month. National Suicide Prevention day was earlier in the month in the UK, whilst September 8th-14th was Suicide Prevention Week in the US.  Although the ways we talk about suicide and mental health have been improving in recent years, there is still a huge stigma attached to the subject, and talking about suicidal thoughts and feelings. Suicide is on the rise globally, with 800,000 people dying by suicide last year, so it’s more important than ever that we raise awareness, to try and stop so many people dying from suicide.

Iron deficiency symptoms, as we explored last week in our blogpost, are common in pregnant women and in women who experience heavy periods. Another predominant age group at risk of iron deficiency symptoms are infants and children. In this week’s post we will explore how iron deficiency manifests in the under 18’s and symptoms to be aware of, which can give you an early warning that your infant or child is becoming iron deficient.

Answering yes to this question is much more likely than you’d think. The World Health Organisation estimates that more than 25% of the world’s population is affected by anemia, with half of these cases being due to low iron levels – that’s a staggering 2 billion people. If this is the case, why don’t we know more about the condition and why aren’t more people being treated for it? Part of the explanation lies in the fact the symptoms can be non-specific, they can easily be confused with other illnesses, and can come on very gradually. They can also disappear temporarily before returning, perhaps under a slightly different guise. Other sufferers may have visited their doctor complaining they just feel constantly under the weather, as tiredness and lethargy are the most common symptoms, and been told they just have a virus. Pregnant women and those who have recently given birth are most likely to be iron deficient, as are those who have heavy periods. But unfortunately it’s not always just a simple case of getting a blood test as, depending on the type of deficiency you have, your results could be misinterpreted leaving the patient once again with no explanation for their symptoms and putting them down to just ‘life’.